Author and Twitter buddy Marc Nash, has very kindly written a fascinating post on the relationship between music and literature.

Over to Marc:

I never read books until I was 14 years old. Typical boy, I was out in all weathers playing cricket or football instead. What turned me on to literature, was when a respected older Cousin suggested I listen to The Cure’s “Killing An Arab” and then read Camus’ “L’Etranger”, both of which I dutifully did. At the time I was on the look out for cool bands to drop in to conversations at school, but through this one suggestion I had my appreciation opened up to a second vibrant art form. Oh yeah, I not only read books now, I write ‘em as well. And as part of that, music is still key.

Literature is perhaps regarded as the highest, most nobles art form for expanding our minds towards contemplation of the world around us. And rock’n'roll, bubble-gum three minute pop about puppy love and teenage crushes, is regarded in some quarters as the most disposable of art forms. Books occasionally percolate society’s collective consciousness, such as the obscenity trials over “Lady Chatterly” or “Last Exit To Brooklyn“. Pop often outrages, from Elvis The Pelvis, through “God Save The Queen” and the Beastie Boys. Yet despite being from fairly opposite ends of the class spectrum, the two are fundamentally intertwined and mutually inform one another.

Apart from the above example of The Cure, Gang of Four referenced Joseph Conrad’s “Heart Of Darkness” with “We Live As We Dream Alone” and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” with “Love Like Anthrax’s” lyric “Just like a beetle on its back”. Howard Devoto (Magazine) sung “I could have been Raskolnikov, But Mother Nature ripped me off” and also referenced Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” in “Song From Under The Floorboards“. Artists honouring fellow artists who have gone before them. Inspired them. Given them words and ideas to stir their own creative pools…

Of course it goes back the other way too. Poets Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah and John Cooper-Clarke have all performed live with backing bands. Gus Van Sant has set texts by William S Burroughs to music and Steve Fisk made a remarkable piece of music for the late Steven Jesse Bernstein’s poetry on SubPop (if anyone has a link to a download, please supply it to me. My last version of it was on cassette tape!). Then there are the crossover artists, Patti Smith, Nick Cave and Henry Rollins to name but three with a foot firmly planted in both camps. Recently we have had short story anthologies inspired by the words of Mark E Smith and the music of Sonic Youth.

I’m involved in an anthology based on an individual song personal to each author. I have chosen “Holiday In Cambodia” to write about the Khmer Rouge years in control of Kampuchea. Finally I have been able to type something that is sufficiently searing to cauterise that disbelieving rage I have carried around with me for 30 years, but never found the right platform to be able to write about it. While I’m doing that, I also take a pot shot at Goth’s cheap fetishisation of death imagery such as skulls, by giving them a real life golgotha to consider.

Of course I don’t always write so directly about music. But I, like most authors at least to judge by online forums and blogs, listen to music when I write that first draft (not when I edit though, I need to concentrate hard for that). Music provides me with three things. Firstly the overall tone of a piece, once I have established the main themes and metaphors, I look for the equivalent in music to set the mood. For example, for my novel set in the hedonistic holiday resorts in island Greece, I listened to a non-stop diet of Rebetika (Greek outlaw blues) and trance (for the clubber mentality). The second is for the rhythms involved; the music helps steer the actual sentence flow. Again, by way of example, for a novella about teenage gang culture and knife crime, the spacey, languid rhythms of dubstep were cut across by the harder, explosive jungle and grime. The last is that the music orients the brain; that after any break for tiresome activities such as work or sleep, by putting on the same ’soundtrack’ I can slip straight back into the mood and rhythm as I was in when I broke off from the writing. Somehow it cuts through all the other information and distractions of the world and channels me right back in the world of that particular book.

It’s an interesting symbiosis that is relatively recent. Presumably Fyodor Dostoevsky wasn’t humming the works of Rimsky Korsakov to himself while writing in prison. Joseph Conrad hadn’t persuaded his fellow crew members to whistle some sea shanties to help his creative juices flow. It started with the jazz age in America that inspired Noir fiction, through to the Beats. We still have the stimulation of music, both past and contemporary. What worries me is that on our side, the literary side, our contemporary output is not of sufficient interest to continue to inspire the musicians in turn. We writers need to raise our game. For my humble part, my current work in progress is being written to an accompaniment of Einsturzende Neubauten (for their German poetic rhythms) and 90’s art noise merchants from NYC Swans (for the assault on language that were Michael Gira’s lyrics). I guess one thing I’m safe in saying: no other author’s got that on their writing soundtrack! Easy listening, easy reading – no thank you!